


Things I Never Wanted To Say (or: Things You Never Wanted To Hear)

by ungoodpirate



Series: Putting The Puzzle Back Together [2]
Category: Glee
Genre: Gen, Hiatus fic, M/M, Post-The Break Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-12
Updated: 2012-10-12
Packaged: 2017-11-16 03:26:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/534967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ungoodpirate/pseuds/ungoodpirate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You can't hate me more than I hate me."<br/>"I don't hate you." </p>
<p>After Grease, Kurt seeks out Blaine. They talk for the first time since Blaine was in New York. Things are said, things are decided, things change, and it's all you can do to walk away after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things I Never Wanted To Say (or: Things You Never Wanted To Hear)

Rachel and Kurt returned to McKinley to support their former glee-mates in their performance of Grease. It turned into an unofficial reunion, with most of the graduated glee clubbers showing up. It was odd, Kurt realizing these people he used to spend so much time with, he hadn’t spoken to them since they had all gone their separate ways at the end of summer, some before then. 

Most of them didn’t know about what went down between him and Blaine. Kurt hadn’t made changed his facebook relationship status. Neither had Blaine. 

“Do you need me to take him down?” Mercedes said quite seriously after Kurt had conferred the story to her. And God, he hadn’t even told Mercedes? It was sad how people grew apart.

Mercedes and Blaine had never been close. It was Kurt’s own fault, having ditched Mercedes more than a few times in favor of spending time with Blaine; it must have left her with a sour flavor in her mouth, subconscious or not. But the biggest fact remained that he had been growing away from her as he had been growing close to Blaine, and there was no cause-and-effect about it. It was just what had happened. 

“Please don’t,” he said. “Please don’t make a big deal out of it. I just thought you should know. It’s bound to be obvious something’s wrong.”

Later he was tucked away in the audience next to Rachel as the lights went down and the show started. He couldn’t help the cheek-hurting grin that formed on his face. He was just a show tunes loving kid, deep down, after all. He hadn’t spared much time for music, lately, the rejection from NYADA and then the discovery of something new at Vogue.com. But here, in the audience of a high school performance, watching his former classmates absolutely kill it in the best way possible, he had been reunited with an old love.

Then Blaine came on stage, and Rachel gripped his arm. He was glad of it, so he didn’t have to grab her. She was tempering him.

“He was good,” Kurt whispered to Rachel when Blaine’s song was finished. What he was really saying was ‘You can let go now’ and ’I’m okay.’ 

She patted him on the arm where her grip, like a brand, had been and pulled back. She could be there to buttress him at times, but ultimately he needed to stand by his own strength. 

The end of the musical and a standing ovation later, the crowd was filtering out of the auditorium. “I’m going to go wait backstage,” Kurt said to Rachel, impromptu. 

“Are you sure?” she asked. He had been planning a very tactical and organized way of avoiding Blaine during his visit to Lima, with Rachel as his wingman of it all. 

“I’m sure,” Kurt said, and he disentangled himself from the crowd. He took a familiar path around a few turns in the corridors. The hallways down here were dark, probably to discourage audience members from wandering around the school. He wasn’t dissuaded though. 

He settled against the wall in a nook between two rows of lockers, folded away. Sugar pushed through the backstage door first, but she didn’t see him; she was distracted by furiously texting on her phone. 

Kurt pushed farther back in the darkness. He didn’t want to be found and deferred from his purpose. It was a fresh purpose, something that he had only dawned upon in the last quarter of an hour, but he was assured of it. He was always a person who knew what he wanted sudden and for sure. 

A clump of girls he was unfamiliar with came out next, then “Sandy” and “Danny.” Within the next five minutes, he thought he was sure he saw the whole cast and crew leave if he was estimating numbers correctly… but no Blaine. He taped his phone on and checked the time. Another five minutes had passed, still no Blaine. 

Kurt was almost ready to give up, thinking perhaps he had missed Blaine when he left in a group, or that Blaine exited the auditorium a different way. The door opened. Blaine came out, and even after a successful performance, with all of his cast mates having been brimming with energy and excitement, he looked so down. Small in a way that Blaine, even though short, never seemed to Kurt. 

Kurt was so stunned watching him – the slump of his shoulders, the drag of his feet, his heavily-blinking eyes – that it took him a moment to call out to him. 

“You were really good,” Kurt said, stepping out from his nook. “But that’s not exactly a surprise.”

Kurt was staring at the back of Blaine’s head, the back of Blaine. The man had stilled at Kurt’s voice and only after a stretched silence, the buzz of the auditorium crowd dying down in the distance, did he turn. 

“Kurt,” Blaine said, and he looked simultaneously misery-ridden and as if he was looking at a dream. “I—” but he didn’t have something to finish that statement. Kurt took pity on him, on the boy before him with the large, puppy-eyes. 

“Hey,” Kurt said, moving across the hall, and leaning a shoulder against the lockers.

Blaine imitated his positioning. “Hey,” he said, and then, “Look, I’m –”

Kurt put up a hand to stop him. “I know. You’re sorry.” It could’ve been mean. Maybe it should have been. Kurt had every right to be mean. It wasn’t though. It was resigned, because if ‘sorry’ fixed things, then they would have been fixed twenty or some times over already. 

“But I am.”

Blaine was staring at him. There was so much hope and so much anti-hope, waiting for the blow, in those eyes, that Kurt had to duck his head away under it. He wasn’t even the guilty one. This confrontation hadn’t been the best planned out. 

Kurt said nothing, so Blaine spoke up. “You can’t hate me more than I hate me.”

“I don’t hate you,” Kurt said instantly. That had never been a questioned in his mind, ever. “I hate what you did. I’ve been pissed as hell at you over it… but not that.”

“Well, that makes one of us,” Blaine said quietly, and Kurt wasn’t sure if it was meant for his ears. 

“I wasn’t going to talk to you,” Kurt said, “When I came back for Grease. And then I saw you on stage, and my heart…” He stopped, squeezed his eyes shut, and shook his head. He started again. “I thought about West Side Story, and our first…”

“Yeah.” Blaine’s eyes were wet. Even in the dimness, Kurt could see that. 

It was hard to breathe, like there was pressure on his chest, like he was fighting through sobs though his eyes were tearless and his demeanor steady. 

“I realized that I still love you. I’ll always love you.”

Blaine’s arm twitched like he wanted to reach out, but his body knew better, that Kurt wasn’t his to just touch anymore. “I love you too,” he said instead.

“Please let me finish,” Kurt said, for things were getting harder and harder to voice. Physically, like his own lungs were fighting back against him. “It doesn’t fix things, though, you get that, right? Because seeing you, thinking about you, I feel that same horrible rush of betrayal over and over again. It’s like something I can’t even believe.”

Blaine nodded, his jaw tight. 

“A lot of things have been left unsaid between us lately, and I guess I’m saying that… I’m breaking up with you.”

Blaine’s Adam’s apple bobbed in a gulp. “Okay,” Blaine said in a forced steadiness. 

“Okay?”

Blaine’s eyes flicked down to the floor and back up again, but not meeting Kurt’s. “I’ve been expecting it.”

“If it means anything, I never wanted to say that.” 

Blaine shrugged a shoulder, his lips tight, as if holding back a million things. Kurt translates it as ‘I never wanted to hear that either.’

Kurt continued. “The thought of not being with you hurts a lot. But the thought of you… cheating, it hurts a whole lot more.”

That was it. That was it. And Kurt didn’t know what he expected. Explosions or something other than a dark hallway. 

He pushed off from the locker. “Bye, Blaine,” he said, in order to say something. He went down the hallway and left Blaine behind. Reaching the corner, he glanced back for a second, an impermanent second, to see that slumped form still leaning against the lockers. 

Then he thought he heard something. Thought, for it could have been his brain filling something in or reordering noises to make it sensible. He thought he heard, “I missed you.” 

He kept walking. For what else was there to do when you’ve torn out your own heart.


End file.
